What I’ve learned from Al Gore — 2: on water and ice
It was a privilege to join the three day Climate Reality training by Al Gore in Berlin last week. Today part 2 of what I learned from my personal highlight: an almost three hour long titillating, splashing presentation by Gore himself. It was not just interesting or fun. It was also worrying and scary. Luckily not all hope is lost if we step up our game.
In the first series of blogs, of which this is the second one, I will describe the problem more in depth. In the latter ones I will focus on solutions. And on what you can do yourself!
I finished my previous blog post about how the north pole was melting mid-winter. This was in part because where cold air normally circulates around the north pole, the polar vortex split in two. Now, that sounds complicated. But look at it like this. It meant that cold air now was blown to Europe and North America, and hot air was pushed to the poles. The UK and Ireland were entangled by the ‘Beast from the East’ as this cold wind was called.
The amount of arctic sea ice has been dramatically dropping over the past few years. I wondered why, but Gore showed that about 93% of all the extra heat we have goes into the ocean. The result of the rising temperatures is that the sea water temperature also has been increasing. Why is this important? Next to that this temperature is starting to destroy ocean life, it turns out that for each additional 1 degree Celsius, air can hold 7% more water vapor. This is nothing new: let a hot shower run and your mirror will steam up. That does not happen if you let a cold shower run.
Tropic depression Harvey became a category four hurricane in two days, and it soaked up more and more water from the Gulf of Mexico. Why was this possible? Because the waters in the gulf were about 4 degrees Celsius warmer than normal — all the way down to 200 meters. And that warm water did not cool down the air, and so the air was able to hold more and more water. The result was a lot of downpour. The town of Nederland, Texas received 1.5 meters of rain in five days. That is a lot of water. Gore drove down the point that if we do not do all we can to reduce our climate impact, we will see more storms like Harvey soon.
But let’s not think Harvey is unique. Open the news, and you see floods all over the world. In August 2017, more than 1,400 people died because of floods across South Asia. More than 700,000 homes were destroyed or damaged in Bangladesh. The Caribbean was damaged hit by hurricane Maria in September 2017. According to estimates more than 4,500 people died in Puerto Rico. Cuba was hit. St. Martin. Dominica. Maria followed a path over water that was almost five degrees Celsius warmer than normal, and went from a category one to a category five hurricane within a day. Sadly enough, the poorest people are the ones that suffer most.
We often express weather in a way that says ‘this is a one in a thousand year storm’. The essence of this is that it really should only happen once in a thousand years then. In the United States –I lack figures for Europe in specific– there were fifteen 1-in-1,000 year rainfall events since May 2010. Perhaps, it is not as once in a thousand years as we’d like to think.Globally, floods and enormous amounts of rain are four times as likely than in 1980.
When you get to observe an extreme rainfall event from a distance it looks nothing but spectacular. Spectacular and devastating. Extreme rainfall does not merely happen with hurricanes. It happens all around the world and causes flooding. Close to my home in Germany alone: in 2016 there were floods in Obernzell on June 25th and Simbach Am Inn on June 2nd. For 2017: Rhüden, July 26. Oranienburg, June 29. Braunsbach, May 30th.
In 2018 it has happened to Ellicott City in Maryland in the US, which was hit both in 2016 and 2018. Volgograd, Russia, April 4th. Villeneuve-Sain-Georges, France, January 26th. Mogadishu, Somalia, May 21st. Nairobi, Kenya on March 15th. And the list goes on and on. To places like The Netherlands, China, Bangladesh, Malaysia, DR Congo, England and Austria. And this is all but exhaustive.
The most extreme example Gore told about in my opinion, was what happened in Cordoba, Argentina on October 26th of 2017. There was a lot of rain in just 15 minutes. How much downpour can fall, you may ask yourself, in just a quarter of an hour? The break of a football match (of which currently the world championship is held) takes fifteen minutes. You may sometimes spend that time on the toilet on a day with bad luck. The answer is 1.5 meters. Of hail, not of rain. Suddenly cars were not drifting away, no, they were stuck in the ice on the highway.
I could continue like this for a while, but I hope you get what these examples show: it is getting wet. Really wet. The next blog will be about droughts, fires and food.
